Wounded Putin will be more dangerous than ever
The scale of Russia’s military collapse in the northeast of Ukraine has prompted celebrations in Kyiv but a wounded President Putin is likely to be even more dangerous.
A lightning counteroffensive by the Ukrainian army has forced Russia to abandon key towns such as Izyum and Kupiansk in the Kharkiv region and amounts to arguably the biggest setback for Moscow in the war.
Ukraine has also seized large numbers of Russian armoured vehicles and tanks as it recaptured around 350 square miles of territory in just 48 hours. The advance came after Russia was tricked into redeploying forces to the southern Kherson region to try and counter an anticipated Ukrainian campaign there.
Amid the euphoria, a senior official in Kyiv said that the Ukrainian army would now seek to cripple the Kremlin’s war machine, even if that meant chasing Putin’s army across the border into Russia itself.
“If Russia remains in the form it is, it is only a matter of time before it will be able to start another war,” Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s national security council, said.
“Our task is to make Russia into the kind of country that does not have even the desire to think that it can attack its neighbours,” he told Voice of America radio. “Ukraine’s armed forces will halt [the counteroffensive] where our interests end and that will depend on many circumstances.”
The Russian city of Belgorod is just 25 miles from the Kharkiv region and has been hit by multiple rocket attacks since the start of the war. Oleksiy Arestovych, a senior adviser to President Zelensky, at the weekend tweeted a mock image of Ukrainian troops at the city’s borders.
Danilov’s comments were likely to have been made with Kyiv’s western backers in mind, but any attempt by the Ukrainian army at a large-scale incursion into Russia would push the war into an even more dangerous phase.
Putin said last year that Russia would use nuclear weapons if its sovereignty was threatened. He warned western countries in February that any attempt to intervene in the war would trigger “consequences greater than you ever seen”. Days later he put Russia’s nuclear forces on high alert.
Margarita Simonyan, the head of the Kremlin-backed RT media outlet, told television viewers recently that Russia would not hesitate to use nuclear weapons if it was facing defeat in Ukraine. Aside from the nuclear option, Putin could also launch massive cruise missile strikes on Kyiv – a move that hardliners have been urging for months.
While Russia has sought to portray the rapid retreat of its army as a “regrouping”, its loss of large swathes of the Kharkiv region could accelerate in-fighting in Moscow. There are rumours that Sergei Shoigu, the defence minister, could be replaced, while Ramzan Kadyrov, the ruthless Chechen leader, has threatened to “explain” the situation on the ground to Kremlin officials.
Hardliners have also slammed what they say is Putin’s weakness in Ukraine, as well as his refusal to formally declare war on Kyiv, something that would allow the army to carry out nationwide mobilisation. “Now even the blind and deaf must see the truth that the special operation has ended long ago,” Zakhar Prilepin, a nationalist politician, wrote on Telegram. “War has begun.”
Putin has already proven that he is willing to sacrifice untold numbers of lives to stay in power. In invading Ukraine, he unwillingly injected an element of unpredictability into a political system that he had succesfully purged of all uncertainties. The Russian dictator has few good options now. The world must hope he does not choose the very worst of them.
